How AdRoll uses Clearbit and Tray.io to process and enrich thousands of leads

Guest post by Andrew Park, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Tray.io

AdRoll needed a better way to segment and prioritize a huge volume of opportunities for its sales teams.

A leader in online advertising, AdRoll offers thousands of marketers worldwide an average of 5x return on ad spend to drive more than $240 billion in sales every year. A significant factor in the company’s success at this scale has been its relentless search for innovative ways to rapidly identify and take action on promising leads.

"More than 37,000 marketers worldwide use AdRoll. We sell to hundreds of thousands of websites every day, which requires us to process and filter enormous amounts of data quickly," says AdRoll’s Head of Revenue Operations Halbert Luong. The company also wanted to remove the painful bottlenecks of manually organizing and inputting new leads from multiple sources.

To move quickly at scale, AdRoll turned to the powerful automation of Tray.io’s General Automation Platform, paired with the lead enrichment capabilities of Clearbit Enrichment.

Optimizing for the right data enrichment cadence with Tray.io and Clearbit

First, AdRoll set about tackling the challenge of segmenting its vast list of opportunities.

Because the company serves such an enormous audience, it has multiple sales teams focusing on different market segments based on web traffic. “We have an incredible sales team that’s 200+ strong, but in order to make the most of their talents, we needed to be able to surface and provide a complete and updated picture of lead data on a weekly basis,” Luong explains.

AdRoll had already been receiving Alexa rankings from Clearbit, but the monthly basis caused challenges. Web traffic often fluctuates due to seasonal or extrinsic events, which means websites that appear to be strong opportunities based on recent traffic this month may be one-off spikes that don’t reflect the same activity in subsequent months. In addition, the monthly update led to a surprising issue for a database containing hundreds of thousands of websites: data scarcity. An entire quarter provides only three traffic data points.

The team needed to get past the limits of its monthly Alexa data to benefit from the granularity of weekly data. To tackle this challenge, AdRoll used the Tray.io General Automation Platform to pull in Alexa rankings from Clearbit weekly rather than monthly.

With automated workflows that integrated Clearbit’s enrichment capabilities, AdRoll could fill out every account’s details to enable its sales teams to rapidly identify the best opportunities and follow up more quickly. And with more-granular weekly data coming in from Alexa, the revenue operations team is better able to identify website traffic trends over time.

sample Tray.io workflow

Automating away the struggle to manage multiple lead lists

AdRoll’s ambitious revenue operations team doesn’t just rely on Alexa rankings to find opportunities. The team also receives lead lists in CSV format from multiple business units who procure them from sources such as demand generation campaigns and field events. Given the size of AdRoll’s total addressable market (TAM), these spreadsheets often end up being huge, unwieldy documents that are extremely time-consuming to manually collate, reformat, de-duplicate, and use to create new accounts in the team’s CRM solution, Salesforce.

"Obviously, these lead lists are important, but processing them manually just wasn’t scalable, particularly as we continue to grow," says Luong. "We continually need an influx of fresh data from different lead lists injected into our system regularly, but each time we needed to cross-reference between different filter criteria and keep our system rid of duplicates."

"The ability to automate the lead enrichment, uploads, and deduping of our lead CSVs saves many manual hours each quarter." — Halbert Luong, Head of Revenue Operations

AdRoll once more turned to the combination of Clearbit and Tray.io to automate this mission-critical, data-heavy task. By building Clearbit into an automated Tray Platform workflow with custom logic, AdRoll can automate data enrichment for lead lists and build in custom filters to remove unwanted leads that don’t match the company’s criteria (such as Alexa rankings, geographical locations, or specific industries). This workflow also syncs with Salesforce to automatically dedupe accounts for these new leads, using Boolean logic to detect whether a new lead already has an existing account and only creating a new account if there isn’t one.

Rather than spending hours on manual spreadsheet jockeying, AdRoll now saves hours of manual labor on a potentially error-prone process, ensuring its lead database is fully baked and rapidly synced with its account database in Salesforce. "The ability to automate the lead enrichment, uploads, and deduping of our lead CSVs saves many manual hours each quarter," explains Luong.

"Clearbit and Tray.io give us the ability to process data and expedite these processes to move even faster, which is why we’re working on even more ways we can use Clearbit and the Tray Platform together."

Interested in finding out how to process leads at scale with Clearbit and the Tray Platform? Learn more here.